To Those Who Would Awaken
       

it will happen like this for many of you,
the house suddenly too much, the garden so full
you go out, maybe thinking of the way the earth gives
under your feet, the water making circles around them
if you have to cross a river, leaves and branches lift
up and then brushing against you when you have
crossed, these things or the very structure of things,
the making of the hip joint, electrical plots in the
heart, thalamus sending reminders to the moving,
you looking up into the still wings of gliding crows
on this day when you know in one second there
is the power to give things new names, so you decide
this is not leaving but returning, that ends are
middles or that there are no points, no time,
so by the time you are miles away from leaving
it is only the eternal very first moment of anything,
making a pound cake from scratch, moving your
hand across the hem of a new skirt, the slight fear
and tremble when a sudden sound hits your wall, like
children throwing the ball against the fire escape
until it rattles like an empty skeleton, the hot shower
where you are alone until the memories step
in with you, deep solitude of living alone, falling
to where you are connected with everything, and
it happens, the stepping out, mind full of seeing
yourself move out into the world without difference
so you can see every move you make is a change
in the current, the arrangement of patterns under a brush,
a twisted calligrapher's stroke, all these things, walking
while the bones of who you are become roots.

Tweet

Copyright © 2013 Afaa Michael Weaver All rights reserved
from The Government of Nature
University of Pittsburgh Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission